The Sound of Things Falling (14 page)

An Uncomfortable Foreboding

Suddenly he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe it was the noise the people made, their enthusiastic greetings, their shouted conversations, or maybe the mixture of smells coming off their clothes and their breath. Whatever the case, Julio suddenly felt as if he were stuck on a merry-go-round that was spinning too fast.

‘I feel woozy,’ he said to Captain Laverde.

But Laverde didn’t pay any attention to him. Or rather, he did pay attention, but not to worry about how he was feeling but to introduce him to a man who was now approaching. He was tall, had a Rudolph Valentino-style moustache and was wearing a military uniform.

‘General De León, this is my son,’ said the captain. And then he spoke to Julio. ‘The general is the General Prefect of Security.’

‘General Prefect General,’ said the general. ‘I wish they’d change the name of the rank. Captain Laverde, the president has sent me to see you to your place. It’s so easy to get lost in this throng.’

That was Laverde: a captain who generals came to look for on behalf of the president. And that’s how the captain and his son found themselves walking towards the presidential grandstand a couple of steps behind General De León, trying to follow him, not to lose sight of him and to pay attention to the extraordinary world of the celebrations at the same time. It had rained the previous night and there were still puddles here and there, and if there wasn’t a puddle there were patches of mud where the heels of the women’s shoes were getting stuck. This happened to a young lady with a pink scarf: she lost a shoe, a cream-coloured one, and Julio bent down to retrieve it while she stood smiling, paralysed like a flamingo. Julio recognized her. He was sure he’d seen her in the society pages: she was a foreigner, he thought, the daughter of a businessman or an industrialist. He tried to find the name in his memory, but he didn’t have time, because Captain Laverde was now grabbing him by the arm and making him climb the creaking wooden steps that led up to the presidential grandstand, and over his shoulder Julio managed to see how the pink scarf and cream-coloured shoes were starting to climb another set of steps, those up to the diplomatic grandstand. They were two identical structures and they were separated by a strip of land as wide as an avenue, like two-tiered cabins constructed on thick piles, placed side by side but both facing the empty ground above which the planes would pass. Identical, yes, except for one detail: in the middle of the presidential grandstand stood an
18
-metre-tall pole from which waved the Colombian flag. Years later, talking about what happened that day, Julio would say that the flag, placed in that precise space, had made him wary from the start. But it’s easy to say such things after it’s all over.

The Show Begins

The atmosphere was festive. The air smelled of fried food. People carried drinks in their hands that they were finishing before going up. Every plank of the two sets of steps was filled with people who hadn’t fitted into the grandstands, and so was the strip of ground in between the two sets of steps. Julio felt queasy and he said so, but Captain Laverde didn’t hear him. Walking between the guests was difficult: he had to greet his acquaintances at the same time as spurning social climbers, to be very careful not to snub somebody who was due a greeting while being equally careful not to honour someone who wasn’t. Making their way through the people, without getting separated for a moment, the captain and his son reached the railing. From there Julio saw two men with receding hairlines speaking with a circumspect air a few metres from the flagpole, and those he did recognize immediately: it was President López, wearing a light-coloured suit, dark tie and round-framed glasses, and President-elect Santos, wearing a dark suit, light waistcoat and round-framed glasses as well. The man on his way out and the man on his way in: the country’s destiny settled on two square metres of carpentry. A small crowd of distinguished people – the Lozanos, the Turbays, the Pastranas – divided the presidents’ box from the back part of the grandstand, the upper level, where the Laverdes were. From the distance, the captain saluted López, López returned the greeting with a smile that didn’t show his teeth, and the two of them made mute signals to each other about meeting later because the thing was starting now. Santos turned to see to whom López was gesturing; recognized Laverde, nodded slightly, and at that moment the triple-engine Junkers appeared in the sky and dragged everyone’s gaze in their slipstream.

Julio was absorbed. He had never seen such complex manoeuvres up so close. The Junkers were heavy, and their streaky bodies made them look like big prehistoric fish, but they moved with dignity. Each time they passed, the air they displaced arrived at the stand in waves, ruining the hairdos of the women not wearing hats. The cloudy Bogotá sky, that dirty sheet that seemed to have covered the city since its foundation, was the perfect screen for the projection of this film. Against a background of clouds the triple-engine planes flew past and now the six Falcons, as if from one side to the other of a giant theatre. The formation was perfectly symmetrical. Julio forgot the bitter taste in his mouth for a moment and his dizziness disappeared. His attention wandered over to the hills east of the city, their misty silhouette that extended back, long and dark like a sleeping lizard. It was raining over the hills: the rain, he thought, would soon be here. The Falcons flew past again and again he felt the tremor in the air. The thunder of the engines didn’t manage to drown out the shouts of admiration from the stands. The translucent discs of the spinning propellers threw off brief sparkles of light when the plane banked to turn. Then the fighter planes appeared. They came out of nowhere, immediately assuming a V-formation, and it was suddenly difficult to remember that they weren’t living creatures, that there was someone in command. ‘There’s Abadía,’ said a woman’s voice. Julio turned to see who had spoken, but then the same words were being repeated from another side of the stand: the star pilot’s name moved among the people like a nasty rumour. President López raised a martial arm and pointed at the sky.

‘Here we go,’ said Captain Laverde. ‘Here comes the real thing.’

Beside Julio there was a couple in their fifties, a man in a polka-dot bow tie and his wife, whose mousy face didn’t hide the fact that she’d once been beautiful. Julio heard the man say that he was going to go and get the car. And he also heard the wife. ‘But don’t be silly. Stay here and we’ll go afterwards. You’re going to miss the best part.’

The Audacity of the Pilot

At that moment, the squadron flew past at a low altitude in front of the stand and then in a straight line to the south. Applause broke out, and Julio clapped too. Captain Laverde had forgotten him: his eyes were fixed on what was happening in the sky, the dangerous designs that were taking place up there, and then Julio understood that his father had never seen anything like this before either. ‘I didn’t know the things you could do in a plane,’ he would say much later, when the episode was relived in social get-togethers, or family dinners. ‘It was as though Abadía had suspended the laws of gravity.’ Returning from the south, Captain Abadía’s Hawk fighter left the formation, or rather the rest of the Hawks peeled away from his. Julio didn’t know when Abadía had been left alone, or where the other eight pilots had gone, having disappeared all of a sudden as if the cloud had swallowed them. Then the solitary aircraft flew past in front of the stand doing a roll that drew shouts and applause. Heads followed it and saw it twist and turn over and return, this time flying lower and faster, tracing another roll with the mountains as background, then disappear once again into the northern skies, then reappear in them, as if looming out of nowhere, and heading towards the grandstands.

‘What’s he doing?’ said someone.

Abadía’s Hawk was flying straight towards the spectators.

‘But what’s that crazy man doing?’ said someone else.

This time the voice came from below, from one of the men with President López. Without knowing why, Julio looked at the president at that moment and saw him clutching the wooden railing with both hands, as if he wasn’t standing on a construction well planted on the ground, but at the rails of a ship on the high sea. Again Julio sensed the acrid taste in his mouth, the dizziness and also a sudden sharp pain in his forehead behind his eyes. And that was when Captain Laverde said, in a low voice to no one specifically, or just to himself, with a mixture of admiration and envy, as if watching someone else resolve an enigma, ‘Good God. He wants to grab the flag.’

What happened next occurred for Julio as if outside of time, like a hallucination produced by the migraine. Captain Abadía’s fighter plane approached the presidential grandstand at
400
kilometres per hour, but it seemed to be floating in one place in the cool air; and a few metres away performed a roll in the air and then another one – loop the loop, Captain Laverde called it – and all in the middle of a deathly silence. Julio remembered that he had time to look around, to see faces paralysed by fear and astonishment, and mouths open as if they were screaming. But there were no screams: the world was hushed. In one instant Julio realized that his father was right: Captain Abadía had planned to finish his double roll so close to the waving flag that he could grasp the fabric in his hand, an impossible pirouette dedicated to President López the way a toreador dedicates a bull. All this he understood, and he still had time to wonder if the rest had understood too. And then he felt the shadow of the plane in his eyes, an impossibility since the sun was not shining, and he felt a gust of something that smelled burnt, and he had the presence of mind to see how Abadía’s fighter plane did a strange leap in the air, bent as if it were rubber and hastened to the ground, destroying as it did the wooden roofs of the diplomatic stand, taking the stairs of the presidential grandstand down with it and shattering into bits as it crashed against the field.

The world exploded. There was an explosion of noise: shouts, heels against wood floors, the sound bodies make when they flee. A black cloud that didn’t look like smoke, but like dense ash, exploded down there where the plane had fallen, and remained in place for longer than it should have. From the area of impact came a wave of brutal heat that killed those who were closest to it in seconds, and the rest felt like they were being charred alive. The luckiest ones thought they were dying of asphyxiation, because the heat was consuming all the oxygen in the air. It was like being inside an oven, one of those present would say later. When the set of steps was detached from the stand, the boards and rails gave way and both the Laverdes fell to the ground, and that was when, Julio would say much later, the pain began.

‘Papá,’ he called, and saw Captain Laverde stand up to try to help a woman who had been trapped beneath the wood of the steps, but it was obvious the woman was beyond all help. ‘Papá, something’s wrong with me.’

Julio heard the voice of a man calling a woman. ‘Elvia,’ he shouted, ‘Elvia.’ And Julio recognized the guy with the polka-dot bow tie who’d gone to fetch the car, walking among the fallen bodies, stepping on some of them or tripping over them. There was that burnt smell, and Julio identified it: it was the smell of meat. Captain Laverde turned around and Julio saw, reflected on his face, the disaster of what had happened. Captain Laverde took him by the hand and began to walk to get away from the catastrophe, looking for a way to get to a hospital as quickly as possible. Julio had now begun to cry, less from the pain than from the fear, when they walked past the diplomatic stand and he saw two dead bodies, and recognized the cream-coloured shoes on one of them. Then he passed out. He woke up hours later, in pain and surrounded by worried faces, in a bed in the San José Hospital.

Lucky to Survive

No one ever knew how it happened, if the plane broke up in the air or if it came from the crash, but the fact is that Julio received a gob of motor oil full in the face, and the oil burned his skin and his flesh and it was lucky it didn’t kill him, as it did so many others. There were fifty-five dead after the accident: first among them was Captain Abadía. It was explained that the manoeuvre had produced a ball of air; that the plane, after the double roll, had entered a void; that all that caused the loss of altitude and control and the inevitable downfall. In the hospitals, the injured people received that news with indifference or amazement, and heard that the Treasury would pay for the funerals of the dead, that the poorest families would receive assistance from the city and that the president had visited all the injured the first night. He had certainly visited young Julio Laverde, at least. But he was not awake at the time and was unaware of the visit. His parents told him about it in great detail.

The next day, his mother stayed with him while his father attended the funerals of Abadía, Captain Jorge Pardo and two cavalry soldiers stationed at Santa Ana, all buried at the Central Cemetery after a procession that included several representatives of the government and the cream of the military Air and Ground Forces. Julio, lying on the good side of his face, received morphine injections. He saw the world as if from inside an aquarium. He touched the sterilized dressing and was dying to scratch, but he couldn’t scratch. At the moments of greatest pain he hated Captain Laverde and then he said an Our Father and asked forgiveness for his evil thoughts. He also prayed that his injury wouldn’t become infected, because he had been told that it might. And then he saw the foreign girl and started talking to her. He saw himself with his burnt face. Sometimes her face was burnt too and sometimes it wasn’t, but she always had the pink scarf and the cream-coloured shoes. In those hallucinations the young woman spoke to him sometimes. She asked him how he was. She asked him if he was in pain.